It’s been a rough, rough week for the Los Angeles Clippers.

That, right there, is a lead sentence that could have been written at almost any time over the last few years. What makes this week a particularly rough one for the Clippers is that America’s greatest employer of ex-high school football players with word processing skills, Sports Illustrated, has decided to put the Clippers on the cover.

In a staged picture that probably would have been replaced with Qolsky’s Qrazy Qwiz in TSL, three people (one of them helpfully wearing a "Clippers Basketball" t-shirt) sit, alone, with brown paper bags over their heads ("Just Shoot Me," one reads). Beneath it is this critical beatdown of the NBA’s team most-likely-to-be-kicked-when-down: "The Worst Franchise in Sports History."

This hurt me.

Not so much because of the bad journalism it indicated (ayo: Washington Senators?), which is the reason I haven’t fucked with SI since high school, but because I am a Clippers fan. I watch them on television. I follow them in the news. I even used to post on Espn.com’s Clippers message board, but then I realized how dorky that was and decided not to tell anyone except the readers of TSL. Currently, that message board is dominated by a 14 year-old from Azusa who writes in all capital letters. I’ve taken my business elsewhere. From what I saw, Sports Illustrated might want to take heed to the science.

Inside the "ghetto-fab’lous" cover–no, really, that’s what they call it–is essentially a drastically overlong caption for a table demonstrating that the Clips are, in fact, the losing-est team, percentage-wise, in pro sports. It’s hard to argue with the numbers, and, luckily, Sports Illustrated didn’t so much try. Instead, they broke out a two-year old file photograph in which not one of the five Clipper players depicted (one of whom, Brent Barry, has played for not one but two teams since leaving the Clips late in the 97-98 season) is currently with the team. Alongside the picture is a quote that is desperately, pathetically, wrong: "Watching them play, you are struck with the indescribably sad thought: They really are trying!" Which is both ignorant (because the healthy Clips look pretty good, and the weird hodgepodge team the Clips are fielding now has played the Phoenix Suns and the Utah Jazz to close losses recently) and incorrect (because, often, the Clips are not trying).

But, of course, the author of the article didn’t watch the Clips play. He didn’t have to. One of the rights that all sports fans feel they have is that to mock the Clips as much, and as as stupidly, as they wish.

Because the Clips lose. All the time, and badly. Richard Hoffer, the writer of the SI bit, needs only to check the box scores: here are the Houston Rockets shooting sixty percent against the Clips, there is Shaquille O’Neal, the giant with the ball-bearing eyes, dropping 61 points on Clipper backup "centers" Anthony Avent and Pete Chilcutt.

They lost both those games. And they lost them in a unique, Clipperian fashion: against Houston, the Clips were getting beat down the floor off inbounds passes, as Rocket players streaked downcourt for open dunks (and, in the case of Cuttino Mobley, did a dead on imitation of Nike’s truly ghastly discontinued puppet-monster Lil’ Penny in the process). Against the Lakers, after foul prone center and number-one pick of 1998’s NBA Draft Michael Olowokandi called it a night, Shaq backed down Avent (who has trouble catching passes but seems like a nice guy) and Chilcutt (who looks like a Sagehen) mercilessly. I watched both those games. It wasn’t fun, but I did it.

I’ve tried to figure out why I became a Clipper fan, or why anyone would become one. I may be unique in that I have a history of, and penchant for, being attached to bad teams: I grew up a New Jersey Nets fan in suburban Jersey, a part of the country not unlike the Clips in the frequency with which it is mocked. I know that when I first decided I liked the Clips, which was while watching them lose on TV during my sophmore year, it was because they reminded me of the old, true-school Nets of the early nineties.

For others, Clipperness is perhaps a reaction to an unwillingness or inability to root for the Los Angeles Lakers, a team that is surely one of the most self-satisfied and repulsive results yet born of the ravages of late twentieth century capitalism. There is also an element to cheering for the Clippers, though, that is not unlike investment, if I can continue the capitalism theme: get in early, while a team is awful, and it feels that much better when they come around. This was how it went for me and the Nets in the early nineties, when the team briefly turned around under coach Chuck Daly, prior to the death of guard Drazen Petrovic in a car crash.

It was the idea of buying low that led real estate magnate Donald Sterling to buy the then-San Diego Clippers in 1984. Sterling moved the Clippers to Los Angeles a few years later, but, as his team’s value escalated (relative to the thirteen million dollars Sterling paid for the Clips in ‘84, even the Clippers, the NBA’s lowest-valued franchise, were a good pickup), Sterling continued to refuse to pay his players competitive salaries. The good teams the Clippers put together, both in the early nineties under coach Larry Brown and in 1996-7 under Bill Fitch, have dissolved in a series of free agent defections.

Some of these ex-Clips have gone on to good careers as role players, but most of these defectors (among the notable names are Rodney Rogers, Bo Outlaw, and Lamond Murray) have taken backup positions elsewhere. And they have taken them gladly.

This year’s Clipper team has been sad. A healthy Clippers team would be (and was, early in the season) very competitive, but a healthy Clippers team is like getting a tasteful quote from Matt Kolsky on the existence of the Women’s Studies major: both exist only in some shadowy philosophical netherworld between not-a-chance and no-fucking-way. Promising second-year power forward Brian Skinner has been on the disabled list for months. Guards Eric Murdock and Derek Anderson have missed numerous games, mostly because they do so every year: Murdock may well be in Europe right now, trying to figure out who he’ll play for next year. Gangly, befreckled backup center Keith Closs periodically misses games for no particular reason, only to return with a bizarre new hairstyle (yeah: afro puffs) and an unfortunate urge to shoot three pointers. "Power" forward Maurice Taylor, aka Armon Gilliam 2000, has missed games due to ankle and shoulder problems, but makes up for it with a winning attitude that is exemplified by his habit of writing the date of the beginning of the free agent signing period on his sneakers.

The Clippers are also the worst-conditioned team in the NBA, as they were during the entire tenure of departed coach Chris Ford. The Clippers who are in the best shape are guys who have already played a whole season of CBA basketball: guard Jeff McInnis and Outlaw-esque power forward Etdrick Bohannon (pronounced: "1% Body Fat, makes layups"), luckily, are both signed with the Clips through next year, when they can take it easy and stop exercising so much.

There are some promising players on the Clips under contract for next year, especially rookie Lamar Odom, who does things I haven’t seen any NBA player do and still gets pissed when the Clips lose. Nevertheless, the same rule that Andy Moon misunderstood in his article on the Bulls applies to the Clips: this team will not get better fielding a poorly-coached team of lottery picks and young stars playing out their contracts. It won’t happen in Chicago next year, where the coaching is good, and while the talent is not lacking, it probably won’t happen for the Clips.

The Clippers are doomed, it seems, to obscurity, forever a group of good players in a good sports city playing badly for a bad team. This can be blamed on Sterling, and probably should be. But simply because they play in the Lakers’ green-tinted Kazaam-sized shadow does not mean they will never improve or are not worth investing in. GM Elgin Baylor has made some good moves of late, and the team is loaded with draft picks and young talent (if also loaded with guys like Avent who don’t belong in the NBA). And, most importantly, they are not the Lakers.

How to end an article on these guys? They don’t win, and sometimes they don’t try. They get made fun of, and they deserve it a lot of the time. But they have personality, albeit the sort that is naturally assorted with lovable losers, and a couple of legitimately exciting players. At times, when they whine, or laze through games, or seem unable to execute even the most fundamental elements of the game, they push the limits of that lovability.

They have yet to push me too far. And when they start winning, when the Clipper revolution starts, I’ll be the guy letting the air out of the tires on Kobe’s Montero. We have nothing to lose but our losing.